The Lost Tribes, page 11
Within minutes the computer signaled that its computations were complete. A final report concluded, “No data detected,” and was uploaded. Only the data below 10,000 MHz was sent. The computer logged off and closed the browser. Information above 10,000 MHz was saved to a password-encrypted file on the hard-drive. A blank document opened. The data translated into words, symbols, technical diagrams and complex math formulas. Ben caught a glimpse of jewels, stones, and topographic maps of Earth. He could have sworn he saw schematics for advanced weaponry. He blinked and the images were gone. It took less than five seconds for the program to finish. Once complete, the computer closed the file, stored and powered off.
After a few seconds, Ben recovered enough to risk a question. “Do you understand any of this?”
“Yes,” Carlos whispered. He sank into a large tapestry chair and stared vacantly at the blank computer screen.
“So, what’s going on?” Ben asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.
“My dad …” Carlos’s chest heaved in and out at double its normal rate. His face went beet red. “He’s not analyzing satellite transmissions for SETI. He’s blocking them.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
“If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.”
George Bernard Shaw
“I am so dead. Maybe I can scrape up enough airfare to flee the country before he gets back. Did you see all those satellite dishes coming on line? What’s a Casmir array? There’s no place I can hide except the moon. I’ll have to hitch a ride on a Soyez rocket.” Carlos massaged his temples and shivered as if chilled to the bone.
Ben looked from Carlos to the computer. “Rockets are down, remember? Solar flares.” The pained expression on Carlos’s face told him he’d just made things worse. “Listen, there’s got to be a logical explanation. Think about it. Your dad likes games and, okay, he’s weird, but it’s not like he’s some super spy.”
Carlos shook his head from side to side. “I’m gonna die. I’m so gonna die.”
“Come on! It can’t be what you think. Spies are cool. They have slick gadgets and awesome sports cars. They DON’T have families and live on boring cul-de-sacs and drive carpool in Volvo station wagons.”
“The Volvo is mom’s. Remember? My dad drives the Porsche Turbo. That thing’s a menace ever since your dad started messing with the engine.” Carlos clutched his stomach and heaved like he was going to barf all over the carpet. “Maybe it’s just a cover story. Maybe we’re not even his real family.”
Ben laughed. “Tell you what. Our dads are buds right? I’ll ask my dad what’s going on.”
“And spill the beans about us sneaking in here? You’re not even allowed to go messing around in his den.”
“Oh. Right. Then, we’ll figure it out. It’s got to be some nerd simulation. Your dad’s the only grown-up on the block who plays computer games. You said he’s always blasting space mutants or crashing ships, right? So, that’s it! We logged on to online gaming by accident.”
Carlos’s face went blank. Ben considered that to be an improvement.
“Come on. Think about it, if he were a spy would he have left the computer unprotected? Anyone could have broken in and logged on.”
“We did.” Carlos moaned and buried his head in his hands.
Ben groped for an answer that would satisfy Carlos and kill his own nagging doubt. “But if it were secret, he’d have it hidden behind some secret panel, or have passwords you have to type in. Right? What kind of spy leaves spy secrets out in the open? With kids like us around?”
Carlos looked up. “You’re right. We couldn’t read the instructions so we don’t know what it was doing. Could be a fantasy role playing game he set up with other SETI nerds.” He perked up a bit. “Did you see those maps and jewels and weapons? It could be stuff for some space version of Dungeons and Dragons.”
Carlos seemed back to his old self, but seconds later, he slumped back in the chair. “Still doesn’t explain that big satellite dish, though.”
Ben laughed. “Oh, yes it does. Big boys like big toys. That’s what my mom said when Dad got his new car. He would have bought an 18-wheeler if she had let him. Remember when we went to the RV show and she had to drag him out of the tour bus with three bedrooms? And how the dads all drool at the Air Show every time the Blue Angels do stunt tricks. Mom had to practically tackle Dad to keep him from signing up for the Naval Air Squad.”
There was a long pause while Carlos digested the information. His facial muscles relaxed a bit. Ben could tell a kernel of doubt still lingered.
“Hey! I just had a brilliant idea!” Ben said. “Tell your dad you’re in the mood for some father-son bonding. Ask to play one of his computer games then get him to show you the SETI program. Maybe we can find out what the star codes mean and plug them into the game.”
Carlos gave a mock shudder. “Dad keeps asking me to play but they’re too bloody.”
Ben was overcome with envy. “He asks you to play and you turn him down? Are you nuts?”
“Honestly, I think we were born into the wrong families,” Carlos said.
“I had the same thought. You play basketball like an exact clone of my dad. Anyway, if your dad wants you to play computer games, then that’s our chance to get some answers. Take lots of notes and screen shots. I want blow-by-blow details of the blood and gore.”
Carlos scrunched up his face. “All right. I’ll do it. This will just be our secret. Okay?”
“Deal.”
“Swear to it. Your dad’s mellow like a Vulcan. Mine’s one of those Predator guys.”
“I swear. We can meet back up in Llactapata and retrace our steps. Can’t let the girls get too far ahead of us. We’re down one jewel to zero and I’m looking forward to giving Serise my share of green glob.” He let out a belly laugh and tried to release the last of his tension.
“Okay. It’s a plan.” Carlos retrieved a microfiber cloth from his backpack and wiped down the computer, the mouse, and the desk, giving extra special attention to the arms of the chair. “Let’s get out of here. If anyone asks questions, I’ve been helping you with math and you’ve been giving me basketball pointers.”
Ben followed Carlos, stopping to take one last look at the sleeping computer. In the back of his mind something still felt off.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Son of Casmir
“Do not follow where the path may lead … Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ben and Carlos sat, legs dangling, on the edge of the granite platform in Llactapata. The game picked up right where it left off — complete with ominous cloud hovering over the nearby mountain range.
A parakeet landed on a nearby branch and chirped excitedly. Carlos held out his finger. The parakeet hopped on and continued its oratory apparently happy to have an audience.
“You okay?” Ben studied Carlos’s face. “You don’t look so good.”
Carlos sighed. “Dad went back to Peru this morning. He’s gone a lot lately.”
“Yeah, mine too.” Ben followed the graceful flight of a black bird.
“I did it,” said Carlos.
Ben frowned and braced for bad news. “Did what?”
“Last night, I told my dad I wanted to play games with him. You should have seen his face light up.”
Ben was delighted but confused. “But that’s a good thing, right?”
Carlos frowned. “He kept patting me on the back and saying, ‘My son!’ like he was proud of me just for asking.”
The black bird issued a distant call.
Startled, the parakeet flew away.
The black bird gave chase.
“Okay! That’s promising. So then what? Give me all the bloody details!” Ben playfully punched him in the arm.
Carlos flinched.
Alarmed, Ben withdrew.
“He said I have to work up to the space games because they were advanced,” Carlos continued. “He’d have to coach me on advanced avionics and how to pilot the ships — lots of controls, stuff about black matter and gravity wells and wormholes. So he wanted to start with something primitive: The Art of War. We pretended to be historical figures and set up armies.”
Ben grinned and imagined himself playing along with Carlos’s dad. “Sounds like fun.”
Carlos sighed. “No! It was awful. I felt sorry for the other side and getting ambushed. My men deserted or surrendered. Now I know how you feel when your uncle is around. It was like one big test. I could tell Dad was disappointed. So I said I was interested in astronomy and wanted to learn about the SETI stuff.”
“And?”
Carlos’s voice lowered to a whisper. “He showed it to me — the SETI program. It didn’t look anything like what we were messing with. It’s just a graph that runs data as a screensaver. We kept it running in a window while we switched to a game called ‘The History of the World’. As a screen saver it was kind of cool, lots of rainbow colors, but there was nothing about satellite dishes or Casmir arrays. I mean — nothing! The SETI program said it would take twenty-four hours to process the data before we got a new file.”
Ben was ecstatic. “Your dad’s got a lot of games. This is going to take longer than I thought.” He studied butterflies flitting on plants nearby. They beat their wings repeatedly in an insect version of Morse Code: flap, flap, flap, pause, flap flap, slow flap, flap. Ben made dots and dashes in the dirt to match their rhythm.
“Dad’s been acting strange ever since he got back from Peru,” Carlos said.
“More than usual?” Now Ben was worried. Carlos was often quiet but never withdrawn.
“Worse!” Carlos drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. Goosebumps covered his arms even though the weather was warm.
“He set himself up as this Incan emperor, Atahualpa and led his tribes to massacre Spanish Invaders. He mumbled something about them bringing Typhoid fever and killing villagers for gold, payback for reneging on a ransom and preventing an execution. Ben, he was slaughtering the Spanish camps even after they raised white flags and tried to surrender!
Carlos paused to catch his breath, his face growing pale. “After a while he wasn’t even looking at the screen. He kept scrolling through the notes on his phone while he hit the space bar over and over to shoot at the enemy or launch another attack. He hacked the game so he could give the Incan warriors high-tech laser guns even though it wasn’t historically accurate. It wasn’t pretty. Then he scrolled the timeline back about forty years, navigated to the Atlantic Ocean and blew up a bunch of ships — Christopher Columbus’s ships! Didn’t even look for survivors. He just jumped forward and went after Amerigo Vespucci right after his ships left Italy. Something was bugging him. I mean, he was angry even for him.”
Ben’s mouth gaped open in delight.” So then what happened?”
“Mom came in and whispered something in his ear.” Carlos continued. “She winked at me, gave Dad a kiss on the cheek then smacked him on top of his head. He stopped and booted up something else. In the new one, we had to break into a museum, unlock a bunch of safes and steal jewels. Lots of puzzles, but …” Carlos paused and took a deep breath. “I could still tell something was on his mind and it wasn’t something good.”
Ben pondered the problem and all he could came up with was envy. “So did you ask him about Peru? Did he mention anything we can use?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Carlos said staring at Ben like he’d missed the point. “He didn’t lose control until I told him your uncle gave you a computer game. I told him the clues led to Peru. He laughed. But it was kind of a fake laugh, if you know what I mean. Like he was trying to act surprised but wasn’t.”
“Carlos, your dad was just shocked that you wanted to play — out of the blue. This is a good thing!” Ben clapped his hands then stopped when he noticed Carlos’s mood darkening. “What did I miss?”
Carlos twisted a leaf in his hand and found a caterpillar. Pulling a branch close, he guided the insect to safety before crushing the leaf in his hand. “He said we wouldn’t find it in the Andes Mountain. Too far away. He said to try the island where they harvest guano.”
“Guano?” asked Ben.
“Bird poop. I think that means we’re supposed to go to Islas Ballestas. Remember? It’s covered in it.”
“Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!” Ben gave a loud whoop, then paused when he remembered there were scientists working nearby.
Computer simulation, Ben! Get a grip!
The black bird swooped closer to the team and circled as if evaluating their work. The cloud flashed, threatening to unleash a rainstorm at any moment.
“You don’t get it do you?” Carlos sighed and looked as if he had lost something dear.
“I get that your dad gave us a great clue,” Ben said. “What’s the problem?”
“I told him we needed to go to Peru,” Carlos said. “That’s it. I didn’t tell him we were in the Andes Mountains. Peru’s a huge country. The only way he could have known …”
Thunderstruck, Ben finished the thought. “Was if he saw us there.” Now his arms filled with goosebumps too.
Carlos sucked in another lung full of air and shuddered. “I went to the bathroom to catch my breath and when I came back he was on the phone, pacing and yelling in Spanish about some guy named Kurosh. He hung up when he saw me. Not before I was able to translate a weird comment though.”
“What?”
“He said he was a son of Casmir and wouldn’t go willingly.”
A thick palpable silence hung in the air for several minutes as Ben pondered the new development. Son of Casmir? Casmir Array? Solar pulses? Government satellites?
Secrets.
“I had a thought,” Carlos said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s crazy though.”
“Can’t be crazier than finding a bunch of life-size Moai heads in my bedroom, or us sitting here in a jungle,” Ben said.
“Those scientists you saw the first time, what did they look like?”
Ben hesitated, not wanting to add to Carlos’ distress. “It was a computer simulation. Besides, Grace’s dad was in New York,”
“He wasn’t,” Carlos said, his voice cracking. “I talked to Grace during fifth period today. Her dad was in South America.”
Ben sucked wind as the last bit of his heart dropped into his stomach.
“You said you thought your uncle was secretly working for a gaming company. Could it be something else?”
“Like what?” asked Ben, not sure he wanted to know.
“Could he be working for the CIA? Using us and the game to flush my dad out?”
“No!” Ben protested, although his uncle was very much like a bounty hunter and carried himself like Special Ops. “That’s crazy. It’s not like your dad is hard to find. You live next door! He sent steaks for dinner. Besides, my uncle was on safari with my dad in Kenya.”
“So he said.” Carlos arched his eyebrows and seemed skeptical. “What did the man look like? The man you saw in the jungle.”
“He was sitting down. It was hard to tell. Maybe a mustache …”
“And a goatee?” Carlos paused and swallowed hard. “And a brown backpack?”
“Well, yeah. But look! There are a lot of brown packs on the site. Plus it makes sense that my uncle would model the avatars on people he knew.”
“What about the hair?” asked Carlos. “Long hair?”
Ben clasped his hands and prayed he wouldn’t be hit with a bolt of lightning for the whopper he was about to tell.
“No.”
It was one single word. Hopefully he wouldn’t be condemned the rest of his life for telling it.
“My dad gave me something. A leather flask and a pouch.”
“Red?” Ben immediately regretted his lack of self-control and braced for Carlos’s reaction.
“So you saw it?” Carlos shook him hard. “You saw it!”
Ben shivered as a cloud shrouded them in a dense fog. He crossed his fingers and closed his eyes as he told the next half-truth. “Of course I saw it. He had it with him at the sweat lodge.”
“Not in the game?” Carlos deflated and seemed almost relieved.
Ben shrugged and shook his head. No. He wondered if a nonverbal lie carried the same penalties as a verbal one.
Carlos slumped. “None of this makes sense.”
“On-line gaming, remember?” Ben lied. “I saw something about it on the news last week. People are addicted. They make up new identities, new civilizations, design avatars. Your dad has been working hard. He’s just blowing off steam. It’s a game. A stupid game.”
“Then why not show it to me?”
“R-rated maybe? It’s why my mom won’t let me near them.” That or he’s an international spy with a supersonic plane that lets him go back and forth to Peru at the speed of light.
Ben swung his feet aimlessly. Above him, the black bird soared closer in wide arcs. He wondered how a bird that big could stay aloft in the thin air.
Got any clues?
The bird flew closer, the tips of its wings spread like the fingers of a hand. It banked as if to point at the ground beneath Ben’s feet. Ben saw nothing unusual in the brush. After a second pass, the bird flew off toward the neighboring mountain range and the cloud that still hovered there, flashing inside with bursts of light.
“Condor,” Carlos said, breaking the silence.
“Huh?”
“That bird you’ve been watching. Condor. Eats mostly dead animals.”
Ben sighed. Carlos’s mood was getting darker by the minute.
“Want to dial home and play the game later?” asked Ben. “Who cares if the girls are ahead? They’re stuck on the Stonehenge puzzle.”
